Saturday, 28 February 2015

The Cavalry Memorial was erected in 1924 to honour the mounted soldier, a species of fighting man that had not only lost many thousands in the Great War but also seen its functions disappear. So it is appropriate that the monument should be an exercise in nostalgia for a lost age of chivalry and romance.The figure of St George is by Adrian Jones, the army vet turned sculptor. He based the horse on a drawing by Durer and the figure on a 1454 effigy of the Earl of Warwick.

The dragon lies dead beneath the horse, a lance sticking out of his belly. The idea was to symbolise the end of tyranny, a point rammed home by giving the dragon the Kaiser's trademark upturned moustache.

The podium is decorated with a parade of cavalrymen from all the countries of the Empire that supplied units - you can see the Australians' wideawake hats, Indian and Sikh turbans, Mountie-style hats from Canada as well as solar topees and the steel helmets that most of them ended up wearing.

Despite Adrian Jones's military experience, the monument inevitably came in for furious criticism from former cavalrymen who wrote enraged letters to the Editor of the Times like this one:

"The memorial may be alright on artistic grounds but it will strike every properly trained cavalry officer with dismay. It is supposed to represent a column on the march in the formation known as half-sections, and in this formation it is essential that each pair ride a half horse's length behind the pair in front; a squadron proceeding in the manner depicted on the panel would suffer more casualties on the march than at the hands of the enemy. The column is presumably supposed to be moving forwards, but all the horses are reining back - except the one in the centre, which is being reined back but is moving forward. Must truth always be sacrificed to art? Young recruits will be shown the memorial as an example of how not to do it."

The memorial originally stood at the edge of the park opposite Dorchester House, in front of a rather grand stone screen by Sir John Burnet. Now Dorchester House has gone, Park Lane is a thundering dual carriageway and the Cavalry Memorial has been moved further inside the park, sadly shorn of its architectural setting.

Monday, 16 February 2015

The Mermaid Fountain is a copy in artificial stone of a work of some charm by William Robert Colton erected in about 1897.According to Spielmann's British Sculpture and Sculptors of Today (1901), it was Colton's breakthrough work:

After he had studied in Paris, Mr. Colton first drew notice to himself with the fountain erected in Hyde Park, executed to the order of H. M.'s First Commissioner of Works during a lucid artistic interval of the Government. The influence of Mr. Alfred Gilbert seems to be in this charming production; but it is open to the criticism that the figure is abruptly cut off at the middle.

Indeed, it looks as though the girl is standing up wearing an enormous tutu.

Sadly, the artificial stone copy (made in the 1970s) has not worn well and, as an added indignity, the poor mermaid seems to have been renamed Little Nell for no readily apparent reason.

Wednesday, 31 December 2014

Walls and Trumpets is an installation by the Israeli artist Ofra Zimbalista, erected in 2008 on a rather dreary office block dating from the 1970s by the look of it.

Blue figures are a recurring motif in Zimbalista's work. The figures are created by moulding real people in fibreglass, coloured with a blue pigment imported specially from Morocco where it is used in house paint.

The most famous collision between walls and trumpets is, of course, the Battle of Jericho. Does the artist want the walls of Maya House to come tumbling down?

Monday, 29 December 2014

The machine gun is the totemic weapon of the First World War, slaughtering men by the million as they struggled over the barbed wire and mud of noman's land.How do you commemorate the memory of the men who pulled the trigger? They also served, they also died. They also were brave. But their weapon was a barbaric killing machine.

The people who commissioned the Machine Gun Corps memorial did what must have seemed the right thing by commissioning the leading sculptor Francis Derwent Wood to create a top quality work. His statue of David is outstanding - noble and heroic but thoughtful and gentle, without aggression or posturing.

David holds the massive two-handed sword of Goliath, having just beheaded the giant with it. He is flanked by a pair of realistically-modelled Vickers guns, silent, barrels pointing down, bedecked with wreaths. The discarded helmets and coats of the gunners lie below.It is the biblical verse on the plinth that gives one pause. From 1 Samuel 18 vii, it reads: "Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands."

When the memorial was unveiled in 1925 there was outrage, many condemning it as glorifying war. Letters were written to The Times and questions asked in Parliament.

When a road widening scheme necessitated its removal in 1945 from its original position in Grosvenor Place, it took nearly 20 years before it was re-erected.

Derwent Wood himself served as a medical orderly in the trenches and later designed prosthetic masks for burns victims, so he was entirely aware of the nature of the conflict. His aim was to point out the solitary position of the machine gunners in their positions forward of the rest of the army facing the tide of the assault. Despite the carnage they inflicted, the machine gunners themselves faced the worst casualties of any unit at about thirty percent, gaining the nickname 'The Suicide Club.'Perhaps something more abstract would, in retrospect, have been safer. And a less inflamatory biblical verse. But Derwent Wood's David remains a fine work of art.

Sunday, 28 December 2014

The Quadriga on the Wellington Arch must be one of the last major celebrations of victory before the carnage of the First World War stripped away our delusions about the glory of war.

Erected in 1912, the group depicts the winged goddess Victoria riding a four-horse chariot, also symbolic of triumph. It is by Adrian Jones, the army vet who made a dramatic career change to become the foremost sculptor of horses in the Edwardian era.

The horses leap and rear with tremendous vitality, and the boy driver (modelled on the son of Lord Michelham, who donated funds for the statue) leans forward excitedly with the reins. The model for Victoria was Beatrice Stewart, who also sat for Sargent, Augustus John and others (and later was the young Patrick Leigh Fermour's longsuffering landlady).

There seems to have been a move to rebrand the statue as 'Peace descending on the Quadriga of War' but it is no such thing - Victoria and her Greek equivalent Nike flew around battlefields dishing out laurel wreaths to heros, not trying to bring reconciliation and harmony like some UN arbitration committee.

The statue was erected in memory of King Edward VII, who had (when Prince of Wales) been impressed by a plaster sculpture of a quadriga entitled 'Triumph' by Adrian Jones at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1891.

The history of the Wellington Arch is a text book account of the egomania, vendettas and political expediencies that often form the background to public sculpture projects.

The arch was designed by Decimus Burton in 1825 as a northern gateway to Buckingham Palace, standing right opposite the grand entrance to Hyde Park next to Apsley House. The original design was much more heavily ornamented and had a quadriga on top, but most of the folderols were axed by the committee brought in to control the stratospheric costs of the Prince Regent's expansion of his new palace.

For years the arch had nothing on top, until a cabal of top politicians led by the Duke of Rutland finagled the Wellington Memorial Committee into agreeing to a monster equestrian statue of their hero to be placed on it. The idea was that it was diagonally opposite the Duke's London home so it would be nice for the old boy to look out on it.

The statue was designed by the Duke of Rutland's protegee Matthew Cotes Wyatt. When it was put in place in 1846 it was greeted with jeers, partly because its size was completely out of scale with the arch but mainly because it was hideous. Attempts to remove it were, however, blocked by the Duke who threatened to resign all his public appointments if it was touched. Even Queen Victoria backed off.

Eventually, after the Duke's death, the arch itself came to be seen as a traffic obstruction and in 1883-5 it was moved to its current site. The statue was taken to Aldershot where it would be better appreciated.

Once again controversy raged over a replacement, eventually satisfactorily resolved with the Quadriga we see today.

Friday, 24 October 2014

The Joy of Life is by T.B. (Thomas Bayliss) Huxley-Jones and was created in 1963.It was the last work commissioned by the Constance Fund, a sum of money set aside by the painter and patron of art Sigismund Goetze to form a memorial to his wife Constance. As it turned out, he died first and the fund was administered by Constance until her death in 1951.
The fund was set up for "the encouragement of Ideal Sculpture and its setting for Parks and Public Places in conjunction with the settings and surroundings"; had a rather odd committee structure, set up by Goetze, consisting of "three sculptors, an architect, a horticulturalist and a few laymen." When a site was found, a competition was held offering five prizes of £50 and £1,500 to the winner.
"The Joy of Life" is a great work, full of both joy and life. The four children playing in the spray are particularly charming.

Monday, 13 October 2014

The figures of two great explorers enliven the blank wall of the Royal Geographic Society's lecture hall, Ernest Shackleton and David Livingstone. Sir Ernest Shackleton's reputation today is based on a very British failure. The aim of his 1914 polar expedition was to cross Antarctica, but his ship Endeavour was crushed in the pack ice and it was his leadership in extracting his crew without losing a man that has made him a cult figure. He is portrayed in full cold-weather gear in the 1932 statue by Charles Sargeant Jagger, It is a very characteristic Jagger piece - very statuesque, full-frontal. The only movement is subtly suggested by one foot being slightly in front of the other, and he holds one hand behind his back. There is an interesting photo of his assistants working on the full-size work for the foundry from the maquette.

Dr David Livingstone's search for the source of the Nile and his meeting with Stanley earned him mythic status in his lifetime and throughout the imperial period, but today he is regarded more cautiously. He was as much a missionary as a scientist, and he opened the interior of Africa to colonial rule. But he is ultimately redeemed by the fact that he really loved both the place and its people. Livingstone's statue was created in 1953 by T.B. Huxley-Jones. It is a much livelier pose, as you might expect from the creator of all those fountains with writhing figures. The good doctor leans on his cane, cradling his Bible in his other hand, his coat over his arm.